Blazing a trail for Barack Obama

Blazing a trail for Barack Obama

Source: Toronto Star - Ontario, Canada

Author: David Olive, Columnist

Date: 31 August, 2008

Forty years before Barack Obama, chosen last week as the Democratic Party's nominee for the U.S. presidency, there was the Rev. Channing E. Phillips. The son of a Brooklyn pastor, Phillips, a District of Columbia-based civil-rights leader and social activist, was the first African American whose name was placed in nomination for the U.S. presidency by a major political party, the Democrats. His name was put forward at their tumultuous 1968 convention in Chicago…

Phillips was pastor at Washington D.C.'s Lincoln Temple – like Obama's long-time Chicago church, from which Obama estranged himself this year, a congregation of the United Church of Christ. Phillips was later a minister at Manhattan's Riverside Church…